MCCC helps veterans transition to college life

MC3 Veterans Club faculty advisor Ann Marie Donohue, center, talks with club Vice President Dansel Landingin, left, and and Matthew Benko, a readjustment counseling therapist with Veterans Affairs, during a meeting of the Student Veterans Organization in the Veterans Rescource Center at the Blue Bell campus of Montgomery County Community College on Wednesday. Photo by Mark C. Psoras/The Reporter

WHITPAIN — Greg Meinhardt, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, doesn’t mince words when describing the transition from the military to college.

“Potty training and walking was easier,” he said. “I only had to deal with one person, my mom.”

Now, Meinhardt, a Souderton Area High School graduate from Harleysville who attends Montgomery County Community College, finds himself surrounded by other students he describes as “ignorant 18-year-olds.”

“Your maturity is so much higher,” said Meinhardt, 25, who spent more than five years in the Marines and was discharged in February 2011. “Being stuck in a classroom with them is awful.”

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Meinhardt has found support through the Student Veterans Organization, a peer networking group for student vets. Thanks to a $115,000 grant from the nonprofit Collegiate Consortium for Workforce and Economic Development, the college recently converted a building into a Veterans Resource Center where student vets can have a quiet place to study and hang out together.

“We wanted to provide a space where it’s OK to be in transition,” said Ann Marie Donohue, associate professor of psychology and advisor to the Student Veterans Organization.

As a result of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which went into effect in August 2009, MCCC has seen the number of veterans on campus nearly double, said George Pannebaker, veterans’ academic advisor. In 2008, there were 180 veterans on the main campus in Blue Bell. Now the number is about 400. It’s remarkable, particularly because MCCC doesn’t do any special outreach to veterans.

During the Vietnam era, the U.S. Veterans Administration had representatives on college campuses to help student veterans ease into college life, Pannebaker said. “After the war, that went away,” he said. “And during this war, the VA has not done anything like that at all.”

In early 2008, Pannebaker, a veteran who has experience working at the VA, was hired to help student vets with the transition.

Pannebaker has had prospective students call or email him while they’re still serving overseas, trying to plan ahead for when they’re discharged.

“It helps having someone here who understands the VA,” he said. “It gives them a contact. They might not understand the benefits they’re entitled to; they don’t trust the big system. The real key to the kingdom is that I see them individually, and see what their concerns are. They’re not always academic.”

The transition to college can be overwhelming, Donohue said.

“I’ve had vets say to me, ‘I don’t fit in. I don’t belong. I hated it in Iraq, but some days I wish I was still there because at least I had a place there,’” she said.

“We are utterly oblivious of what we ask of people when we send them into war,” she continued. “We need to have a better reception, a better bridge.”

Matt Benko is a readjustment counseling therapist with the Montgomery County Veterans Center. He was discharged from the Air Force in 2002 after serving four years in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. He comes to MCCC’s Veterans Resource Center once a week to counsel student vets.

Benko remembers what it felt like to be back in civilian life after serving. “I compare it to a dog being let off the leash for the first time — what do I do?” he said.

“In hindsight, something like this sure would have been nice if it had been around when I got out,” he added.

He worked as a truck driver and bartender before attending college and obtaining his master’s degree. He now serves in the National Guard.

At 25, he decided to enroll in college in California, where he is from. “I was older than the other students. I was older than some of the instructors,” Clark said. “The mindset was ultra naive, a mindset of stupidity. I did more by the time I was 22 than most people do their entire lives.”

By giving student veterans a place where they’re understood, it’s setting them up for success, he said.

“We know what true venting is,” Clark said. “This is giving them a safety net, a sense of community.”

Meinhardt said he has always tended to keep people at a distance, but he’s glad to have found kinship on campus.

“Now that I have people I can talk to, things are better,” he said. “It’s a million times better to know someone is there.”